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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 November 2017
Structural similarities have been noted between Dietrich Bonhoeffer's account of ethical responsibility and more recent accounts advocated by philosophers who emphasise responsibility to alterity. Yet, there remains one stubborn difference between Bonhoeffer and these philosophers: his unequivocal embrace of strongly cataphatic speech. This raises the following question: it is possible for contemporary Christian ethicists and theologians to enlist Bonhoeffer in the aim of reconceiving an ethic of responsibility to the ‘other’ when Bonhoeffer himself relies on such concrete, exclusive language? This article will argue that attention to Martin Luther's defence of theological assertions provides a lens through which the performative force of Bonhoeffer's cataphatic language can be better understood as a particular and traditional use of language that teaches an ethical posture of epistemic humility.
1 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, Ethics, ed. Green, Clifford J., trans. Krauss, Reinhard et al., vol. 6 of Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works [DBW] (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2009), p. 299 Google Scholar.
2 For more on the relationship between Bonhoeffer and continental philosophy, see Frick, Peter (ed.), Bonhoeffer's Intellectual Formation: Theology and Philosophy in his Thought (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008)Google Scholar; and Gregor, Brian and Zimmerman, Jens (eds), Bonhoeffer and Continental Thought: Cruciform Philosophy (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 2009)Google Scholar. I have placed ‘other’ in inverted commas here to indicate the sense in which I will be using this term, but will refrain using inverted commas hereafter.
3 See Levinas, Emmanuel, Totality and Infinity (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991)Google Scholar. See also Butler, Judith, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), pp. 5–7 CrossRefGoogle Scholar and ch. 2.
4 In making this claim with such confidence, I am thinking not only of Bonhoeffer's own critiques – see e.g. Rasmussen, Larry, ‘The Ethics of Responsible Action’, in DeGruchy, John W. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Dietrich Bonhoeffer (New York: CUP, 1999), pp. 206–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I am also thinking of the wider body of literature (including the work of Talal Asad, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Kathleen Davis, and Tomoko Masuzawa) that treats the extent to which colonialism and racisms of various kinds have been perpetuated by self-assured notions of rationality.
5 See the contributions in Boesel, Chris and Keller, Catherine (eds), Apophatic Bodies: Negative Theology, Incarnation, and Relationality (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.
6 Andrew Pettegree points out the strategic advantage of Luther's using simple, vivid language to define and build his movement: e.g. Pettegree, Andrew, Brand Luther (New York: Penguin Press, 2015), p. xii Google Scholar. There is no doubt a dimension to which Luther's language was not used merely to blunt the epistemological arrogance of his foes, but also to garner more trust in Luther himself. Yet, the inevitability of these mixed motivations and ends do not in my view undercut the theological force of reading cataphasis as a tool with critical potential.
7 To be clear, my approach to questions of ethics is unavoidably anachronistic to Luther's sixteenth-century context. For Luther, questions of ethics would have been more easily categorised under the auspices of practical reason and apart from matters of soteriology. Even as he maintains justification by faith, and denies connection between merit and any human works, Luther will affirm the ethical use of both the law and practical reason in guiding the everyday ethical activities of a person in society. These Luther viewed, alongside vocations and worldly governance, as given by God for the maintaining of social order. Yet, when it comes to the question of a truly ‘good’ work – which is my question here – Luther was clear that good works can only be done by Christ, through the vessel of obedience in faith. There is a valid structural sense in which this contemporary critique of ethics is not so unfamiliar to Luther's thinking, as I will explore in this section. I have especially been aided by Gary M. Simpson's essay, ‘Putting on the Neighbour: The Ciceronian Impulse in Luther's Christian Approach to Practical Reason’, in Hockenbery Dragseth, Jennifer (ed.), The Devil's Whore: Reason and Philosophy in the Lutheran Tradition (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2011) p. 31–38.Google Scholar
8 Martin Luther, Sermons on the Gospel of St John: Chapters 1–4, in Martin Luther, LW 22, Luther's Works, ed. by Jaroslav Pelikan, Helmut T. Lehmann, and Christopher Boyd Brown (Philadelphia: Fortress Press; St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House), p. 334. I am indebted to Carter Lindberg (see n. 9) for this reference and its interpretation.
9 Lindberg, Carter, ‘Luther's Struggle with Social-Ethical Issues’, in McKim, Donald K. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Martin Luther (New York: CUP, 2003), p. 166 Google Scholar.
10 Paulson, Stephen D., Lutheran Theology (New York: T&T Clark, 2011), pp. 1–2.Google Scholar
11 See Denis R. Janz, ‘Whore or Handmaid? Luther and Aquinas on the Function of Reason in Theology’, in Dragseth, The Devil's Whore, pp. 49–50.
12 Luther, Martin, The Freedom of a Christian (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008), pp. 50–1Google Scholar; cf. Bernd Wannenwetsch, ‘Luther's Moral Theology’, in Cambridge Companion to Martin Luther, pp. 121, 128–9.
13 For a nuanced discussion on the two different uses of hiddenness employed by Luther, see Gerrish's, B. A. classic article, ‘“To the Unknown God”: Luther and Calvin on the Hiddenness of God’, Journal of Religion 53/3 (1973), pp. 263–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 Martin Luther, Heidelberg Disputation, in LW 31, p. 39.
15 Luther, Martin, On the Bondage of the Will, in Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation, ed. and trans. Rupp, Gordon et al. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1969), p. 138 Google Scholar.
16 Luther, Bondage of the Will, p. 140.
17 Janz, ‘Whore or Handmaid?’, p. 50; Wannenwetsch, ‘Luther's Moral Theology’, pp. 129–30.
18 Luther, Sermons on the Gospel of St John; see Lindberg, ‘Luther's Struggle’, p. 165.
19 For an excellent treatment on how Luther's intolerance for apophatic theology might not be as vigorous as it seems, see Malysz, Piotr, ‘Luther and Dionysius: Beyond Mere Negations’, Modern Theology 24 (2008), pp. 679–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
20 See Lohse, Bernhard, Martin Luther's Theology: Its Historical and Systematic Development, trans. and ed. Harrisville, Roy A. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011), pp. 51–2Google Scholar.
21 Erasmus, On the Freedom of the Will, in Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation, p. 38.
22 Luther, Bondage of the Will, p. 106.
23 Erasmus, Freedom of the Will, p. 38; cf. Luther, Bondage of the Will, pp. 134–6.
24 Luther, Bondage of the Will, p. 105.
25 Ibid., pp. 112–13.
26 Mjaaland, Marius, The Hidden God: Luther, Philosophy, and Political Theology (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 2015), p. 59 Google Scholar.
27 Ibid., p. 96.
28 A similar pattern is visible in how Luther figures the performative functions of the law. For a subject standing in crisis prior to salvation, the law confronts the subject in a kind of battle to the death: either the subject is defective, or the law is defective. When approached in a faith that has already rendered the subject vulnerable to, and open before, the alien subjectivity of Christ, the law functions like an assertion to aid the Christian's activity in the world and before the neighbour. For an excellent treatment, see Simpson, ‘Putting on the Neighbour’, and Wannenwetsch, ‘Luther's Moral Theology’.
29 Bonhoeffer, Ethics, p. 232. The German word often translated ‘reality’ is Wirklichkeit, which Bonhoeffer indicates must avoid any essentialist or identitarian sense. Rather, it refers to ‘the bond between the external world and experiences’, principally for Bonhoeffer the world as it exists in relation to the reality of Christ. This reality is always other to the ordinary person conceived in isolation, and certainly to that which the ordinary person's rational faculties can masterfully comprehend; yet it also represents that which calls to the person and renders her responsible. See Peter Dabrock, ‘Responding to Wirklichkeit’, in Busch Nielson, Kirsten, Nissen, Ulrik and Tietz, Christiane (eds), Mysteries in the Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007), p. 54 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
30 Bonhoeffer, Ethics, p. 293.
31 Ibid., p. 233.
32 See Bonhoeffer, Ethics, pp. 310–14.
33 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, Creation and Fall, trans. Bax, Douglas S., vol. 3 of DBW (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004), p. 86 Google Scholar.
34 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, Christology, trans. Bowden, John (London: Collins Press, 1971), pp. 32–3Google Scholar; see also Bonhoeffer, Ethics, pp. 57–8, 83, 226.
35 Judith Butler frames ethical responsibility to the other in strikingly similar, albeit utterly non-christological, terms: ‘The question to ask is not “what” we are, as if the task were simply to fill in the content of our personhood. . . . The question most central to recognition is a direct one, and it is addressed to the other: “Who are you?” This question assumes that there is an other before us whom we do not know and cannot fully apprehend, one whose uniqueness and nonsubstitutability set a limit to the model of reciprocal recognition offered within the Hegelian [idealistic] scheme and to the possibility of knowing another more generally.’ Butler, Giving an Account, pp. 30–1.
36 Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall, p. 25.
37 The image, here, is not unlike the Derridean secret that is both kept in communication and motivates the desire for continued communication. See e.g. Jacques Derrida, ‘On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy’, in Fenves, Peter (ed.), Raising the Tone (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 152, 162 Google Scholar.
38 Bonhoeffer, Ethics, pp. 300–17.
39 See Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, Sanctorum Communio: A Theological Study of the Sociology of the Church, ed. Green, Clifford J., trans. Krauss, Reinhard and Lukens, Nancy, vol. 1 of DBW (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998)Google Scholar, ch. 5. See also Green, Clifford J., A Theology of Sociality (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999)Google Scholar.
40 Bonhoeffer, Ethics, p. 223.
41 Ibid., p. 331.
42 Gritsch, Eric W., Martin Luther's Anti-Semitism: Against his Better Judgment (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012), pp. 74–5Google Scholar.
43 Haynes, Stephen R., The Bonhoeffer Legacy: Post-Holocaust Perspectives (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2006), pp. 73–4Google Scholar.
44 Ibid., p. 142. See also Ruth Zerner, ‘Church, State, and the “Jewish Question”’, in Cambridge Companion to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, pp. 190–205.
45 Bonhoeffer, Ethics, p. 325.
46 For more on this logic of the gift in relation to responsibility, see Derrida, Jacques, The Gift of Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 41 Google Scholar. For more on the need for forgiveness as central to the structure of the ethical address, see Butler, Giving an Account, pp. 42, 136. For Bonhoeffer's references to the centrality of forgiveness to ethics rather than the aim of perfection, see Ethics, pp. 136–50. Ronald F. Thiemann has explored some of the further interesting resonances between Bonhoeffer and Butler in The Humble Sublime (London: IB Taurus, 2013), ch. 5.
47 This, at any rate, seems to be the complaint at the heart of those who want to resist so-called political correctness.
48 An earlier version of this article was given at the November 2016 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion for the Bonhoeffer: Theology and Social Action Section.